What is a Cloud Provider and if it’s God can I please put a petition in for some self warming socks from last Christmas instead of rain. No, but seriously what is Cloud Provider? A question that vexed my for half the millisecond it took me to Google cloud computing. The definition of cloud providers states that it’s a provider that offers customers storage or software services available via a private (private cloud) or public network (cloud). Usually, it means the storage and software is available for access via the Internet. Having the Patriot Act in affect I was nervous to explore further seeing as some Cloud Providers file share, but I was assured that as long as I wasn’t making a profit from copyrighted material I wasn’t at fault.

With that in mind I went on a thorough investigation of Cloud Providers as well as Cloud Computing, even perusing all of the cached results similar to Cloud Providers. It may not be 2011 anymore but the world of the internet is a vastly changing landscape that spills onto the pages of real life all too often. Looking for the top online cloud providing service the first thing that came to mind is that I already knew the answer to this anomaly.

Who Uses Cloud Providers

Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, even my old school had an online storage site that enabled me to horde untold amounts of memory. Who knew? I could have sworn with the way things are now that they were always like this. What was I doing before I could electronically save a document at home then present it to a class via the internet the next day. I always though it was Microsoft who was spoiling me, oblivious to the internet innovation of Cloud Storage and cloud providers.

 It has been a progression of me going totally Cloudy. I don’t know if that is a term used to exemplify the use of online storage cloud providers, but it’s what I made up so it’s copy-written by me. Since 2009, I would say that’s when I was completely converted to Cloud capabilities. If I wasn’t saving my information to my email so that I could access it anywhere I don’t know what I was doing. Perhaps dancing but that’s another story.

 Reminiscing about teaching the older generation about the uses of email brings back headaches and laughs. My mother who is the most tech savvy person, had difficulty at first converting all of her floppy disk and other files to the Cloud Providers. I will say that she caught on very quickly when her job enlisted her skills to convert their inventory to a program online, specifically made for the teacher student exchange of papers and assignments.

 My grandfather on the other hand took some time grasping the added freedom of sharing thousands of files via the web. Security questions arose and I alerted him of the dangers but that usually happens when you have all of your eggs in one basket I thought to myself. “Don’t worry always have more than one file perhaps even two jump drives,” I remember telling him with confidence. Now that I think about it he doesn’t even need jump drives anymore.  Thanks to cloud providers, he can electronically set up his own online office with twice the amount of gigs and storage space than all of his old computers combined.

Who Are Cloud Providers

Computing in the world of 2012 has become one of the most engaging things one can do if they know what they are looking for. Expounding further would reveal the emergence of  top cloud providers such as Google, Yahoo, Sound Cloud, Drop Box, Spotify, a new one and many many others that I haven’t mentioned. It is amazing and stifling to fathom the amount of gigs let alone bandwidth being used by the billion of citizens around the world.

More About Cloud Providers

Delving further into the subject of Cloud Providers I started ironically with the source from which I began, Google. The behemoth of the internet world, possesses servers that could topple any mountain if we were going by numbers. Reported server capacity was estimated vary depending on the server being used. For you see the internet may be infinite but space all comes down to a giant server with terabytes upon terabytes of unused space. Google search crawler uses 850 TB of information (1 TB = 1024 GB), so that’s the amount of raw data from the web. Google Analytics uses 220 TB stored in two tables: 200 TB for the raw data and 20 TB for the summaries.

Google Earth uses 70.5 TB: 70 TB for the raw imagery and 500 GB for the index data. The second table “is relatively small (˜500 GB), but it must serve tens of thousands of queries per second per data center with low latency”.
Personalized Search doesn’t need too much data: only 4 TB. “Personalized Search stores each user’s data in Big-table. Each user has a unique user id and is assigned a row named by that user-id. All user actions are stored in a table.”

Google Base uses 2 TB and Orkut only 9 TB of data.

If we take into account that all this information is compressed (for example, the crawled data has compression rate of 11%, so 800 TB become 88 TB), Google uses for all the services mentioned before 220 TB. It’s also interesting to note that the size of the raw imagery from Google Earth is almost equal to the size of the compressed web pages crawled by Google.  This also shows why Google is one of the top cloud providers.